canon

The until recently marginal study of ego-texts has become a relevant scientific field, which constantly questions the traditional view of central and peripheral phenomena and authors in literature. This article aims to draw attention to an autobiographer and his autobiographical text, which have remained in the shadow of the traditional literary canon. The study focuses on the interpretation of the autobiography “Povest’ o rozhdenii moyem, proiskhozhdenii i vsey zhizni” of Prince I. M. Dolgorukov (1764–1823), an interesting figure of the Russian cultural scene of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Although I. M. Dolgorukov was a successful writer during his lifetime, today he is considered a “secondary” author. His voluminous autobiography had a similar not very happy fate, as it remained unpublished for a long time. However, the subject of this text is particularly interesting for understanding the evolutionary dynamics of Russian male autobiographical prose in that epoch. The analysis gives the opportunity to identify some typical characteristics of autobiographies in a period when the genre had not yet crystallized in Russia. At the same time, it highlights the many innovative features of the author’s autobiographical discourse. Therefore, the article also compares I. M. Dolgorukov’s text with the “canonical” autobiographies of A. T. Bolotov (1738–1833) and G. R. Derzhavin (1743–1816).

The article insists that “the canon does not tolerate avant-gardes”. With examples from Bulgarian, Polish, Ukrainian, Austrian and Serbian poetry, the position is defended that even in the most representative “classical” anthologies of the respective literatures, avant-garde texts are usually “thrown out”, considered to be some “deviations” from the norm. Examples of such significant neglected avant-garde works are also given. The literary-historical situation is almost the same, whichever literature is concerned.

The text works with the concept of canon in its sense of a set of ideas and cultural codes and their corresponding values ​​and norms that unite a given community. The canon is based on a collectively generated self-concept of the Self, which the research traces in possible directions of development in its relations to the other and the stranger in several stories and humorous sketches by Mihalaki Georgiev, illustrating the humor-generating collisions, inconsistencies, discrepancies between the Self and the collective, between the different collectives in the Bulgarian socio-cultural transition between the XIX and XX centuries. The encounter and failure in communication between cultural canons at the turn of the century demonstrate a rich artistic potential that sets artistic patterns in our literary canon.